Malinconia. Donna che piange sulla spiaggia

Munch spent 1906 in Germany, much of it working for the Berlin director Max Reinhardt, who had him design a production of Ibsen's Ghosts and then paint a frieze for the foyer of his theatre. Those foyer pictures were done in tempera on unprimed canvas, thin paint sinking straight into the raw cloth, and this beach scene is made the same way in the same year. The motif behind it was already 15 years old. Munch had been painting a figure brooding on the curving shore at Asgardstrand since the early 1890s, at first a man, his friend the critic Jappe Nilssen, sunk in an unhappy love affair. Here it is a woman with her face in her hands. Munch left everything still in his studio to the city of Oslo when he died in 1944, and this went with it.